I am not radical in my sorrow.
Alexis Teyie
What has come before,
that which has been handed down —
these are my only methods.
To be normal is to constantly be engaged in a dialogue of cooperation and deviance, presence and absence, civility and banditry. To be normal is to be caught between the grasp of power and the harrow of exclusion, the fire and its flames. In moving through this impossibility, normal people take the shortcut over the grass. Normal people harbour conspiracy theories against the state. Normal people are betrayed by the system. It is not ordinary, as in following the ordinates of society, that isn’t normal. It isn’t normal to wait for the man to turn green in South Africa. Normal is gangstah, seditious and revolutionary.
Anders Høg Hansen’s book, Mix Tape Memories, is a book about largely unknown figures whose lives remained personal and who sought normality in contexts that picked at normality. Being unknown, information about many of these people’s lives is very difficult to come by and so, this is a valuable collection of stories Anders has worked to present for us.
In one story, he writes about his father, Svend Åge, growing up in occupied Denmark during WWII and how his grandfather would secretly distribute leaflets on behalf of the resistance. When his grandfather could not do it, his father stepped in and distributed the leaflets folded into newspapers on his route. The story is about his father, who has since passed and the life he lived during the war and the things that he did that nobody noticed. Mix Tape Memories notices.
The book is an elevator to the ground floor where what once was an edge along a chorus of lines and edges, a crunching, abyssal machine exploding in lights and a cacophony of expletive sounds unfold into a world spatialised by gossip and lates for work, by taxis that are too full and street vendors throwing unsold stock to the birds. From here, the anonymous are recognisable, comfortable, and relatable insofar as they are as normal as you.
Like the story of Lewis H. Michaux who ran the worlds most comprehensive bookstore for Black literature in Harlem, New York. The ambling conversations held there, the consequential meetings of giant figures looking for a book and a normal conversation.
The Beat
Anders has arranged the book as a mixtape, a curated collection of disparate stories, narratives and movements all communicating the navigation of normality in troubling times. This allows him to move dramatically through geographic spaces and time periods, collecting stories and experiences to offer in the mixtape. The stories are seldom based on interviews but are archival finds existing in people’s memories, in letters kept at the bottom of the cabinet, and in email threads from a decade ago.
There is an intimacy here, an affair being exposed. There is something deeply romantic about sharing a mixtape. It is terrifically normal. It’s private. Sharing a mixtape is sharing vistas of your internal habitat, it is to let somebody else ride the horses in your dreams.
Mix Tape Memories arranges time in the grammar of music.
Time periods are movements, a life is a track, there are Sides and rhythms that pulsate in their own signatures. Anders reads a life as music and the subject as the conductor.
This framing is an extension of the mixtape motif and gives each life a beat and rhythm. This also lets you read the book in any order, which I did, jumping continents and movements. In this way, Anders takes his time and often walks in staccato, telling you how he came upon such and such a story and why he’s interested in telling it. These can be tedious walks where he talks about telling a story, and you are suddenly caught reading about a man telling you about a story he wants to tell. I often skipped the long, metacontext-building introductions.
Existentialism
The book contests the way we speak about identity, especially in Westernised societies, and how identity has come to be dominated by Kantean and neoliberal individualism. In the West, identity is defined by Descartes’ assertion I think therefore I am, a self that is self-executing and almost exclusively self-determined. Socially, it has culminated in the high premium we place on independence, self-actualisation and desire for intersectionality to give us our weight in words as opposed to connections.
Where I am from in Africa, the self is not fungible, but it is a single self that is distributed amongst many embodiments. Identity is not self-executing, but it is borrowed from the people in your life. It is defined in the originary philosophy of Ubuntu – I am made up of you.
There is a useful turn to human connection within the frame of Mix Tape Memories. Anders is talking about grand events like the world war, Israel-Palestine, the Civil Rights Movement, but focuses on constellations of human connection, and selves that are co-created. In the highest, Anders presents us with the village of Wahat al-Salam, in Israeli-occupied Palestinian land where Arabs and Jews lived together, named for Isaiah 32:18 “For my people shall dwell in an oasis of peace.” It was a civilian attempt at trying peace, at living together and coconstructing each other as opposed to the depravity of an unequal war.
From the the 1990s, the village had become well-established with its own institutions such as The School for Peace and a House of Silence for prayer and contemplation for Muslims, Christians, Jews, and any other person looking to pray. The purpose was not assimilation, but to try and live together as in the idea of the South African experiment.
Stranger in the Village
Reading the book, I thought about Stranger in the Village, the well-known story of James Baldwin visiting Leukerbad in Switzerland for the first time. It’s a largely unknown town, known only for its hot springs that draw crowds of maimed elderly European people coming to take the waters. The town is so secluded that Baldwin is warned that his presence may be a spectacle and that he should not be surprised.
As he walks into the the village, the children run to him and shout “Neger, Neger!”
I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They are brimming with good humour and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them. Just the same, there are days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play with them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother was a nigger.
Can we fault Baldwin for calling these children’s mothers nigger? Can we fault the children for chanting out the only word they had ever heard to describe a Black person? Should either be cancelled? Have either of them fallen from the grace of humanity? No. They’re being normal.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” says Baldwin. Life is nobody’s fault.
Considering the thread of normality running through these stories, as De Certeau puts it, the work tends towards capturing the “poetic and mythic experience” of normal lives in turbulent times. These stories are footsteps if time is a song. There is Jazz in each measure, a circumnavigation of extraordinary and mundane tragedy. Their normality is not the will to bend when the wind blows, their normality is staying low and firing. This book and the stories it has to tell are normal and true, and I loved it.
In the spirit of the MixTape I asked Anders and Kneo to each pick a song to accompany this review. Editor.
I’d like to go with Order My Steps by Gabi Motuba – I think it is appropriate for the piece. Kneo Mokgopa.
I am picking a song by a band also engaged with in the book, it will be Dengue Fever. I have chosen a song not listed/mentioned in the songs list, p231 (the mix tape within the book Mix Tape Memories). My first preference is the official video for Wake Me Up Slowly, from the latest album (Ting Mong, 2023). Anders Høg Hansen.